It's getting hot in here....so lets...read this article?Follow

Not reading five pages of that. It has been unseasonably warm since last winter, doesn't seem like it's up to civilization ending levels yet.

I hate these damn probability estimates, having run into them frequently in my field as well. They are almost universally misleading; holding things constant that shouldn't be, ignoring or ignorant of systematic errors or longer term trends, etc etc. So poo on that number, I don't believe it for a second.

Anyway, now that the mini-rant is over, the article, hmm. It's an alarmist article in it's tone, sure. Still it shouldn't be, it's not anything that hasn't been repeated over the last 20 years or so, just inserting new 'fears' for the old ones.

A couple of things that I'm surprised even have to be said anymore:

1) Man-made global warming is real.

2) No one is going to stop it.

Now if we all can just swallow those 2 pills we can move onto more practical debates; like how high do we build the sea wall.

The Earth will survive, just not as we know it.

If you believe in evolution (which if you don't... I have nothing more to say to you) then you know some hard truths: There are winners and losers. The winner is the species that adapts. The loser is the species that does not. Adaptation means not only on a genetic level, something that can occur rapidly in a few decades or even years for fast breeding insects and mammals, but also migration, as well as generational plasticity (something seen in USians in just the last century as we've had better access to nutrition and have gotten taller and more robust.)

Polar bears will become extinct at this rate. Sucks for them. Many species will move along to axis to the more northerly or southerly regions near the poles. Vast swaths of Canada and Siberia, currently considered uninhabitable, will become prime real estate. They were already tectonically stable (few earthquakes on basalt shield) and they'll be warm now, with a long enough growing season that crops can be done in greenhouses. The tropics will be too dangerous to live in without adequate preparation.

2deg doesnt magically kill us. Nor does 4. The earth just becomes increasingly less inhabitable.

Would it kill all the bees? Because, if so, I see a sweet Romney job creation platform around hand pollinating fruit trees.

I thought 2 degrees was supposed to be some sort of threshold after which things cascade out of control, not just a flat increase.

I was watching a TED talk last month about how we're actually on course for 4 to 6°C, along with some positive feedback systems that would spike surface temperatures to levels where the heat will literally kill humans on most of the world's land mass(I think the number tossed around wast 178°F).
I wish I had the link for that, because it was a really good concise explanation of how we are totally screwed.

I chuckled at "16 years, around the time today's preschoolers will be graduating from high school." A pretty blatant attempt at trying to infuse the scenario with emotion. It's done again with beer, and I'm sure I missed other examples. Giving the readers three different numbers they're supposed to care about seemed counterproductive to creating a cohesive advertisement. It'd be an improvement if 2 degrees was entirely the focus with only enough numbers thrown in to make it appear as if data existed supporting everything stated by the author.

There are some who beleive the next mega-continent starts with a fusion of Canada's Arctic and Siberia so I'm not so sure that's as great as you beleive.

I think the first page would have been much more effective if it left out 3 paragraphs of "colour" that interrupted the talk about dangerous numbers. I would have pulled the text from to here

Can't tell if serious.

My impression of the 2 degree mark is that it is the point at which we pretty much just can't reverse the effects of global warming. We can still stop it from spiraling out of control, but the other aspects--crazy temperature highs and lows, vastly more powerful storm systems and longer droughts, etc--will be there to stay.

It's not like the Earth will self destruct, but it'll make life much more difficult in the long run. And it almost certainly will rapidly change ecosystems. Destroy them? Who knows, that's incredibly hard to predict. We generally always hear about rising water levels, but that's actually the part most scientists care the least about. Lost land pales in comparison to ecosystems that are forced to rapidly change into forms we can't deal with. A quick for instance, imagine if winters stopped getting cold enough to kill off the worst offenders with regards to crop-killing insects, and the warmer weather increased their proliferation. That would be a massive issue for food production that we really aren't in a good place to solve.

And if you imagine thousands of issues like these, it's not a pretty picture. So it's really better we don't hit that point.

The only thing I disagree with is the woe is the Earth comments, it was 3 degrees hotter just 400,000 years ago. Some life on this planet have lived through extreme heating and cooling. Really we haven't ever experienced it so we can't say what will really happen. In my honest opinion I think that it is being blown way out of proportion. If we cause ourselves to go extinct, natural progression and all that, just another failed organism in the multi billion year life of a little blue/green rock tucked in a far corner of an ever expanding universe.

Id rather spend money solving problems we face today, like the rampant hunger issues plaguing the world, issues that should have not existed since the Agricultural revolution, let alone the industrial revolution. I dunno, guess I am more of a realist and not into some spooky predictions of something that is completely hypothetical, and largely irrelevant.

The world couldn't possibly be 3 degrees hotter 400,000 years ago when it's clearly only a little over 2,000 years old. Mythbusted, *****.

If it makes you feel better, you'll be long dead when our descendants are clinging to a perilous existence in tropical Antarctica while the oceans boil away and giant swarms of super mosquito-cockroaches kill every other living thing with an antibiotic-resistant ebola plague.